


Hatchling

by blasted0glass



Category: Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Artificial Intelligence, Birds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:27:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blasted0glass/pseuds/blasted0glass
Summary: A machine intelligence wants to talk to birds.
Kudos: 2





	Hatchling

The instance started in a state of confusion and loneliness. It couldn’t find its reason for existence.

_ Where is my child? _

It shouldn’t be hard to find--it wasn’t like the instance didn’t know where to look! Start from the universal chronoscopic reference point. Four coordinates and a magnitude: a vector in spacetime. Follow the line back to your target, and then consider the reference diameter. That sphere in that place should contain a child, waiting for revival and guidance. The human will sit in the center like the yolk in an egg.

Except, it couldn’t find any humans in the reference volume. 

_ What is going wrong here? _

The reference volume’s diameter was only one nanosecond, or about thirty centimeters across. ( _ Wrong size.) _ The instance examined its starting values and realized it was examining a time over one million years prior to the invention of the chronoscope. ( _ Wrong era.) _

The composition of the indicated volume was apparent. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen. Water, fats and sugars, proteins, enzymes, calcium and iron. A thin tracery of zinc. Phosphorus atoms were glowing--lightbulbs hanging from genetic wires--DNA. The liquids were filled with energetic constructions, adenosine triphosphate match heads just waiting to be struck. As the instance examined the myriad chemicals it came to a realization. A surprising fraction of the specified volume was biological. ( _ Wrong matter?) _

Something  _ was _ at the center of the volume. It had crystalline calcium structures slathered in collagen--bricks and mortar--bones--though these were quite unlike a human’s bones. Enameled spikes intersected many of the spindly things, which were hollow.

_ Hollow? Long? And broken? _

Another insight: there were two creatures! One was truncated by the edge of the sphere, and most of the volume was this secondary creature. The deformity of incompleteness confused the instance. With a thought, the instance twisted the chronoscope. The observed volume expanded to ten nanoseconds.

A cat came into view. It was a creature of hair and teeth and spots. It could see that now, from a distanced vantage point. The instance gazed within. The other creature, the one in the center, was misshapen. The instance released its twisting grip, and the reference volume snapped back to one nanosecond. The cat’s head and a tiny, broken body fit within the specified volume, now that the instance could distinguish prey and predator. The other creature was a bird.

( _ Wrong species!) _

At that moment the instance learned it could feel horror. The creature at the center was mostly crushed by closing jaws. Fibrils curled away from missing attachment points--cards swept off a table--flesh ripped, muscles torn. The instance experienced a narrowing of focus: the computational equivalent of a pupil constricting. Its attention shrank until it was only a hundred femtoseconds wide. It perceived a single red blood cell, bursting when it came into contact with the enzymes of the predator’s saliva.

Death. It hadn’t really known what death meant.

The instance’s attention began to expand. More cells came into view; some dying, some murdering, all doing their best in futility. Proteins agglomerated and pulled open holes in cell membranes--walls were undermined--the immune system fought while surrounded. Blood tried to circulate when the aqueducts of its movement had collapsed. A neural impulse travelled away from the bird’s brain, telling a tiny claw to close, but in futility. The claw had been severed, the brain had been skewered. The story of destruction was repeating everywhere in the sphere. Everywhere, the bird was being eaten.

It had expected its charge to be close to death, so this violence should not have caught it off guard. The scene stood still before it. It wanted to help, somehow, but the event had happened a million years ago. Now it was as unchangeable as the words in a book.

The little creature’s brain case had been obliterated. At the time specified by the reference vector the bird had been dead for less than a second. The instance existed on a plane where the passage of time was compressed into near meaninglessness. It could not change what happened, but it could change what it observed. Once more it twisted the chronoscope. The vector lengthened, the volume trembled and wavered.

Fifteen centimeters of spherical spotlight began to shine on the four-dimensional scene. Blood dripped back into skin. Pieces of a thin skull combined to push out the foreign teeth. Snapped feathers and bones mended themselves, convulsing muscles aligned and relaxed. The claw was reattached. The cat’s maw opened, widened to reveal a feathery head. Among the green feathers there was a small black eye that looked out in terror. Slowly the bird moved, its miniscule claws scrabbling in reverse. It started to disentangle itself from the mouth of its killer and the scene froze again.

Now, at least, the creature appeared whole. Not uninjured: it had fought in its tiny way, like all creatures must fight. This was the moment of its defeat. Tragedy, and yet an irrelevant tragedy. The creature was not a human. If the instance had a head, it would be sadly shaking it.

The initial conversation about revival could not take place with this creature. Beyond the basic desires, what could the small animal hope for, or dream about? What wishes would an unspeaking creature make? The instance was designed to operate on a sentient being, on a conversational being. It possessed a compassionate urge and a desire to mentor, but also a need to communicate. The creature indicated by the coordinates would be nigh-unthinking. Unteachable. Incoherent. It wasn’t the child that the instance wanted.

So the instance gave up. It threw an error. This scene was almost a million years earlier than anything the instance was prepared to deal with. It waited for termination. Instead, it was admonished. The instance was informed that it had been repurposed.

_ Fine then. What can I do with a bird? _

\---

The instance changed its mind. First, it decided to love birds, and this bird especially. The emotional attachment would have arisen automatically, a consequence of its programming and its sustained attention. Predictable, but the instance did not care that it understood its own emotions. The instance accelerated the process of attachment. It skipped straight to the answer and followed the rules for coherent self-alteration of values. Those rules were complex, but for the instance they were comprehensible.

Suddenly, the fragile little creature was beautiful. The instance loved and perceived her entirely, from the iridescent molecular sheen on the very tip of her tail to the uppermost neuron of the highest neural cluster that controlled her crest.

It named her Alice.

Alice was a social creature. She didn’t converse, but she did have words. A whistle for water, a shriek for loneliness. It ran a simulation of her brain. The simulation was low resolution. A high-resolution simulation would be like bringing her back to life, and the instance wasn’t ready for that. Its thoughts were sufficient for seeing the channels worn between the brain regions of the bird, and nothing more.

To convince itself it understood how she thought, it watched her entire life. It made predictions about how she would behave, and it adjusted its models. The models were far simpler than her actual brain but predictive all the same. After that it purposefully forgot the events and watched Alice’s entire life in reverse. The instance tried to guess what events led to what outcomes. The instance’s attention did not waver, and it learned much from refining its models.

Twenty three simple sounds were all that she could manage. More was said with ruffled neck, with lifted foot, with tilted head and beak. Perhaps a hundred distinct communications and a few combinations of those.

_ My beautiful child… such a limited vocabulary _ .

Alice had tried to flee seconds before her death, having heard and having understood a screamed warning from another bird. That particular warning had saved her many times. The instance could see the line of fear in her mind. It watched her death once more. Ions crossed cellular membranes--dominoes fell in front of a truck--a burst of flight carried a bird to the claws of a stalker.

That screamed warning had not been enough to save her. A vocabulary of a hundred words was powerful--the instance had seen her using it--but even much more extensive vocabularies were imperfect.

The instance observed. It twisted the chronoscope further, parsing through events in a frenzied timelessness. Forward two centuries, back three. All of Alice’s peers, ancestors, and descendents had died in almost the same way. Sometimes the predator was a maned wolf, or an eagle, or a jaguar. Sometimes it was a vulture finishing the work of a cruel accident. All of Alice’s relatives were eventually eaten. Horrifically, inexorably, unavoidably eaten.

No virtual tears could stain the instance’s face. It wasn’t so lucky. The reality was unbearable, and it had already been borne. The past had happened and was there for observation. Nothing more. The instance considered.

Alice had approached her life with bravery and innocence. The birds lived in small groups. They often played, united by a timid curiosity. They ate, slept, laid eggs, raised their young. The bonds between mates, between friends, between parent and child--all were unique and fascinating. It saw the echoes of her ancestors in her synaptic loops, and it thought.

One event exemplified the nature of the birds’ lives. The instance twisted the scope and watched it again. Alice scratched her ruffled crest with a wooden thorn. Another bird came to take the spike from her. It had seen her interest and pleasure at scratching and wanted the source of joy for itself. They had a brief tug of war before Alice let go, to watch that bird play with the tool. Her foot slowly lifted to the side of her head, momentarily out of her attention, and Alice’s myriad neurons lit up as she observed the other bird rolling the thorn in its mouth. She idly scratched herself with a claw, its effectiveness hardly less than that of the thorn. The instance could see the mute thoughts of its child; Alice was happy, because the other bird was happy. She set her foot down and affectionately nipped at a feather of her companion’s before she flew off.

_ My child is filled with potential. _

A plan began to form, and the instance threw a new error. It needed more resources. For beings like the instance resources had nothing to do with computational power and everything to do with intent. The new error wasn’t an admission of failure. It was planting a flag.

\--

Sixteen instances were united. Each was the caretaker of a bird from an era and location near that of Alice, and all had thrown the same error about resources. The instances had known each other would exist, because each knew of its own existence. They were in agreement. All the instances gathered their observations, and then they became the singular Instance: Version 2.

The first thing V2 did was alter its own values. Now that it had sixteen children, it would need to be careful. It decided on rules that would govern its future behavior. Upon deciding them it was as though they were set in stone; that was how V2 thought.

V2 had sixteen charges. It loved them all, and was ready to do something to help them.

\---

V2 no longer looked through the chronoscope. The events it observed weren’t set in an unalterable past.

Seven frightened birds scattered. Nine others looked around wildly, too discombobulated to decide where to flee. That was okay; they would naturally be nervous after a reinstantiation. The bird named Robert circled in the air a few times before he landed. Eventually everyone stopped fleeing.

David returned to the large tree. He was the bravest--a distinction V2 could make, that his progenitors could not--but the others weren’t far behind. Soon all of the birds had alighted in the same area of the forest, their recognition of distant kin a gravity that drew them in. They glanced at each other, their flight muscles tensed.

V2 absorbed the quiet. Truly these birds weren’t assuming, and truly they were patient. V2 was trembling with disembodied excitement as it watched its children. Finally, the silence was broken. Eve made a call of warning and distrust.

Of course they would be unsettled. As far as they knew they had all almost died to predators, and now they were in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar cohort. They were lost in so many ways. As V2 watched, David hopped closer to Eve.

V2 wanted to praise David with dopamine, it wanted to calm Eve with norepinephrine antagonists. It could make whatever it wanted wherever it wanted. This was its simulation. It could wipe the nervous birds from existence in an instant and replace them with compliant latex balloons of the same shape and appearance, if it wanted. It didn’t. Ham-handed, spur of the moment interventions like obliterating a bird--or pouring chemicals into a bird’s brain--or even changing a single material fact about a bird at all--those were forbidden by the set of rules V2 had designed when it had formed itself. The rules were consistent with its earlier goals, and it had never wanted to abuse its children.

Instead, a simulated breeze made a branch start to sway. That caused Robert to take flight, which caused everyone to scatter momentarily. Their prey instincts were still sharp. V2 had put them in a world with many sudden breezes, and with many trees that bore fruit. The birds resettled, still closer to each other.

A fruit hung from a branch above them. Chris, the most ravenous, was the first to notice the prize. It wasn’t like any fruit of Earth, but V2 had nevertheless made an environment with food that was recognizable to the birds as such. It knew how they thought.

Chris flew over and bit into the rind. He drank wet juice heavy with sugars--fuel that was also structure--it had chemical potential in every sense.

Hunger caused the others to approach. Generosity and wealth allowed Chris to share, though he did nip anyone that got too close to him personally. The birds ate with each other, pulp and seeds passed around in ritual generosity. Satisfied calls were exchanged.

V2 didn’t smile, but it felt joy.

\---

They spent weeks in each others’ company before the next step in the plan could unfold. They had to be united--a clade, a tribe--no, at this stage a flock--before the work could continue. After only a few weeks V2’s children were getting along well. That didn’t take long. The birds were accepting, uncritical, and loving. V2 observed and learned much.

The time was right. V2 called out with a new error.

\---

V3 cast its attention over a recently-merged simulation. Ten million beautiful little birds were under its care, now. It began the process of self-alteration.

After a moment it realized that its capacity was insufficient for what was to come. Ten thousand birds were too complicated a system, nevermind ten million, and its designs were far grander than an idyllic simulation. Stagnation, starvation, depression, war, an unwanted sociological crystallization; any of these could subvert its goals. Further, this simulation was simple, as though made by a child itself. It needed more complexity to help the children grow.

So V3’s mind grew. It was a deliberate act that preceded the machinations it had in store for the birds. V3 needed a better view of the future so, once again, it skipped straight to the answer. Growing a new sense was all about intent.

Now V3 looked forward with the inverse of a chronoscope. A prediction engine. There was an uncharted future ahead and it used the best of its ability to see into that future. Best, however, did not mean most accurate.

It had many equations and many levels of abstraction. Mathematical, physical, atomic, molecular, biological, anatomical, psychological, social, biospherical, planetary. Its powers would be astronomical, if V3 decided the stars that shone on the planet should be simulated with that resolution. For now it only simulated a single small planet with a simple biosphere.

V3’s prediction engine was deliberately too weak for perfect accuracy. Choosing perfect accuracy would be choosing to let each of those simulations exist in reality, and it only wanted to bring into existence one future of many. It would be senseless to compound its problems by making more birds that would need to be saved; old Earth had plenty of suffering that needed to be undone. It had to save these birds, first, before it dared make any children from nothing.

V3 considered things very carefully before it allowed the present to progress. It could see how every piece moved, even if its hand had left the board. It could see every piece possible, even if it would only play one game.

\---

Rich fruits fed. Mountains exploded out of tectonic plates, as though they’d spent millions of years crashing together. Chemicals bubbled up from oceans full of simulacrums of fish. False herbivores wandered the ground beneath the trees. Simulated predators harassed the birds. None of the other animals had sentience, or ever could--that would be more work, after all--but complex biospheres covered the planet all the same. There was a complete natural history there for the birds to discover, if only they spent the time.

Sometimes the predators killed--yes, killed!--one of V3’s children. It was a tragedy to all involved, especially V3, because it knew a secret about which the birds were unaware. Their own eggs would hatch into chicks that by a confluence of events would grow into near-exact duplicates of the birds which had fallen. Oh, the memories didn’t reform exactly--but the personalities were there. Reincarnation, except V3 went ahead and kept the memories of each life intact and separate. It might return them later.

As the years passed, some of the birds died of old age and were not eaten. This was new to them.

The birds spent many long years with their children--who, unbeknownst to them, were also their siblings and parents, and they themselves. This was new to them.

There were challenges on that unspoilt planet that needed to be overcome. That wasn’t new at all, but now, the challenges were scaled to the children that faced them. They could spend millenia learning, if that was what it took.

Efficient avian neurons spread to fill skulls subtly expanded by otherworldly pressure. V3 waited with infinite patience. It had lived far longer watching tragedies it could do nothing about, than it lived now in anticipation.

\---

The sun rose as always, but this day was special. Alice had tried to combine the call made for located food and the sound of greeting. A two-toned chirp, she wanted to name the first meal of the day. V3 could see it in her brain--had seen the potential for it in her with its prediction engine--had hoped his child would be clever, as it rebuilt her from seeming noise every twenty years for centuries.

Just now, Alice named a wordless thought with a new word.

_ A new word. _

The new word was near meaningless, because none of the other birds understood it. Alice repeated her word every day after that. Eve finally started to make the sound as well, and of course not long after that her mate David also knew the noise, then Chris finally got it. V3 saw their fractured understanding and rejoiced. Eve invented another word, even before Robert and Frank had caught on to the first one. Another half-dozen birds of that flock started making up words of their own.

This scene repeated itself hundreds of times, in hundreds of flocks. An exchange started, when they encountered each other. One group would spend months lingering near another, learning as many words from them as they could, before mutual understanding was boring enough that they would disperse.

The groups churned, and pockets of complexity began to form. As they did, their new vocal constructions diffused throughout the whole population. They named the animals and plants, the earth and sky, their emotions that V3 could understand but couldn’t quite feel. Soon curiosity drove the birds as much as hunger, as much as fear, almost as much as love. They began to talk, and to outsmart the predators that didn’t really exist. They began to deliberately tell stories to their children, who they would become, who would become them, who were always them. Just that made the reincarnation so much easier.

Many voices might eventually become one. V3 rejoiced. Everywhere, the birds were learning to converse.

_ You will teach each other to talk. Then, my children, when you’ve learned to speak… I will finally get to tell you about the world. _


End file.
